Hands on: Mog All Access puts world’s music in the cloud

Music information and blogging aggregator Mog has launched a new music …

Mog, which until this week focused its efforts on aggregating music blogging, has launched a new All Access music streaming service. The company hopes that All Access's combination of fast search, high-quality streaming, and low cost, in addition to Mog's already extensive sorted index of music blogging will make Mog the premiere music discovery and listening service. Already boasting 6.5 million tracks in its library, Mog is off to a good start.

Mog was founded by CEO David Hyman, who previously worked in the industry as CEO of Gracenote and a SVP of marketing for MTV Interactive—so it goes without saying that he has a love of music. Complementing the site's extensive database of artists, albums and songs, as well as aggregation of related editorial content, the All Access music streaming service is intended to be the best available. "MOG All Access was created by music lovers for music lovers," Hyman said. "Our goal is to offer the best experience for listening, sharing and discovering music by creating a simple, smart, intuitive interface."

To realize that goal, Mog is focusing on three key areas: the widest selection of music, fast searching, and better discovery features. The All Access service launched just yesterday with 6 million tracks in its library, and has already added another 500,000 this morning. That 6.5 million song library is pretty significant; Pandora, by comparison, has just 750,000 tracks available for streaming. The library includes plenty of new, popular music, but also goes deep into many obscure bands and older, catalog material.

We played "Stump the Search" using several obscure bands from our own collections. We weren't able to find elctro-noise outfit Mission Giant, alt-folk-rock band Joseph Plunket and the Weight, Austin-based zolo rockers Zom Zoms, nor Nintendo metalheads The Minibosses. However, we did turn up signer-songwriter Mark Mallman, post-rock instrumentalists The Appleseed Cast, mid-90s ska punk Dance Hall Crashers, and hardcore band Prema, which put out two albums in its short career. Yesterday we couldn't locate ambient indie jazz rockers The Mercury Program, but this morning three tracks from the band's split EP with Atlanta's Maserati were available to stream, along with information about the band's 4 other albums.

There are still incomplete libraries for some bands, as well as missing tracks from some albums, but Mog is working to fill in those spots as quickly as possible. "Adding music is a never-ending focus for us," Hyman told Ars. "We have a full-time guy, who comes from inside the music industry, whose only job is to increase our library."

And picking out artists, albums, or individual tracks from the large collection is not the difficult task you might think it would be. Searching Mog via its search bar is akin to using Mac OS X's Spotlight—it will find all related artists, albums, and tracks for your search terms, and it will find them fast. "Our FastSearch technology was a massive development," Hyman told Ars, and it shows. Mog boasts that the search is so fast that it seems like all the songs are on your local hard drive, and that isn't too far from the truth.

Better yet, albums and songs can be launched in Mog's Flash-based player directly from the search results. It makes getting music playing about as fast as we imagine it could be. (More on the player itself later.)

The last piece of the puzzle consists of the numerous music discovery features scattered throughout the site. For instance, you can save entire albums or individual tracks to your "library," as well as create playlists. You can add other users of the site as a "trusted" mog, and you can view their library or browse their playlists. Playlists turn up in the search results as well; you can, for example, search for a song, find a playlist containing that song, and launch that playlist in the Mog player. Artist and album pages will also include links to relevant online reviews and blog posts that are indexed by Mog. From this perspective, you can think of Mog as an annotated music exploratorium. And, you can also create a configurable feed of what your friends are listening to or reading about on Mog.

The Mog player is where its streaming service seems to diverge most from comparable services such as Pandora or Last.fm—well, aside from its impressively large collection of available tracks. While other services offer a desktop client, Mog's player is browser-only on the desktop. "We preferred to do this over client install—we hate having to install a client," Hyman explained. However, mobile clients are coming for most smartphone platforms early next year. "Our iPhone app is launching soon, and we have secured rights to cache songs locally on the iPhone for offline listening," Hyman told Ars.

Beyond the Web-based client—which is either a benefit or a limitation, depending on your point of view—the player has a number of nice additions. The one we liked the most was a slider which lets you vary the similarity of other artists to the currently playing artist. Unlike other streaming services, this can be set all the way to "artist only," so only tracks by that artist are played. We found the selections to be pretty spot-on—Mog has an impressive collection of '90s hardcore, for instance—and sliding all the way toward "Similar Artists" had an effect much like Pandora's "Music Genome" algorithm.

Another nice feature, which is unique to Mog, is that you can see the queue of songs that are upcoming. Here you can skip tracks, add other tracks, and replay songs, all to your heart's content. Other services have limitations on skipping or show little information about upcoming tracks.

And the player also features several nice "quick access" features. One lets you play the full album that the current song is from. Another lets you give the song a thumbs up or down, like Pandora. Buttons let you view lyrics (when available), save the current track to your library or a playlist, or buy the song from Amazon.com. Finally, two buttons let you share what you're listening to via Twitter or Facebook.

Unsurprisingly, access to all of these songs doesn't come free. While Mog offers a one hour trial for free, or a seven-day free trial by entering credit card information, All Access will cost you $5 per month. That includes unlimited streaming of any or all of the 6.5 million+ 320Kbps tracks—Hyman says that they're the highest quality available from any service—whenever you want to listen. Compared to many other subscription services, that's quite a bargain.

We did make note of a few quibbles as we explored the site, though. Unlike Pandora or Last.fm, which keep everything in a single window, Mog tends to open up a lot of windows in your browser. The player opens in its own window, so you can continue to listen to music while you browse Mog or other sites. But when you click links that take you to another part of Mog, it opens yet another new window. I quickly had about a dozen windows open after checking out a few artists and tracks. Maybe using AJAX or some other method to load additional content in the same window would be a better alternative. Also, we found some of the layout and placement of some buttons on the site's interface to being confusing and sometimes difficult to navigate. Last.fm is much cleaner and easier to discover what things do by comparison.

These minor criticisms aside—such things are relatively easy to fix—Mog All Access shows a lot of promise for those that prefer streaming services. I'm not yet ready to give up my iTunes, iPod, and Airport Express just yet—I have over two straight months of music stored on my computer—but All Access would be an excellent supplement for when I'm looking for something different.

"I have gigabytes of digital music and thousands of records, and I'm using just All Access and my vinyl only," Hyman said. "Give it a try, and you might give up that hard drive."

Seriously, I love Michael Nesmith and he's not really that obscure. But as they say, they're adding new music all the time. I do like that it's pretty extensive in the info they provide for the content they DO have...such as liner notes and lyrics.

I find this article to be a bit disingenuous. Arguably the most similar available service, by price and feature set, is Napster. It also has a web-based player and allows unlimited streaming for $5/month and allows users to amass a "library" of tracks they like. I'd love to hear more about how the players compare, as well as the track selection. And yet, nowhere is Napster mentioned. As a user of Last.fm, Pandora, AND Napster, I'd find a comparison between Napster and Mog All Access to be much more informative than one between Mog and Last.fm/Pandora.

Is it available in Europe, despite our governments' inability to force EU-wide content licensing? This model seems perfect to me - listen to all the music you want for a monthly fee. Oh, and is there any chance that you can listen to music offline, other than on an iPhone as mentioned in the article?

Mog not available in UK. But also no mention of spotify above (probably because not available in US, and only available in six European countries). Spotify also claims in the order of 6 million tracks, though with higher monthly subscription, and currently no free service in the UK (new users have to buy premium).

Originally posted by greggman:I agree with EtherMage. If I remember correctly ars mostly panned Rhapsody, Napster and Yahoo Music. What makes Mog avoid your previous wrath for subscription music services?

Personally, and I spelled this out in the article, I'm not ditching my collection of music for streaming. But I am aware that there will be some people that like streaming options.

I didn't do comparisons with Napster or Rhapsody because I've never used them. I don't know about the relative popularity, but lots of people I know use Pandora or Last.fm—hell, my mom uses Pandora. I've never had a friend or acquaintance ever mention using Napster or Rhapsody.

That being said, Mog is a decent streaming service and is probably a viable, affordable option for someone that prefers listening this way.

Unfortunately, it is only online streaming on the desktop. The client is web-only, though it seems possible to cache locally using HTML5. But you won't be loading tracks on a device like you can with other services. I think they are banking on ubiquitous broadband connections. It's not entirely unlike the distributed music system described in Bellamy's Looking Backward.

Seriously, I love Michael Nesmith and he's not really that obscure. But as they say, they're adding new music all the time. I do like that it's pretty extensive in the info they provide for the content they DO have...such as liner notes and lyrics.

It's probably worth checking back from time to time. I think I mentioned in the article that The Mercury Program wasn't available on day one—now a few tracks are available on day two.

OTOH, I seem to recall seeing an interview with Nesmith wherein he said he was quite opposed to things like digital streaming and iTunes. So maybe he won't allow his stuff to be licensed?

Personally, I'd like to check out some of his solo stuff. I have an mp3 of "Some of Shelley's Blues" that I got from a friend, and I've always really liked that song.

I followed up with Hyman, and he said the service should be available in Canada next month, and in the UK by next April or May.

As you are likely aware, the anachronistic geography-based licensing systems still prevent services like these from being available worldwide without tons of headaches and hassles for the service providers. At least the EU is making an attempt to force licensing to apply to the entire EU.

after years of suffering through the same set of songs shuffling on our ceo's ipod here in the office i finally convinced him to let me make the switch to pandora. i took several days of abuse while training the service to suit his tastes, but everyone here has been much happier since we have made the switch. this service seems tempting, especially with such a nice bitrate, but i'm not sure i want to go through the process of creating a library of songs. does mog offer something similar to pandora's use of the music genome project, where the service will select songs based on a set of criteria i define? the key here is variety, this job is repetitive enough as it is.

This "not available in Canada " thing is getting annoying. Maybe a quick amendment to NAFTA is what is required...would solve many other problems with TV channels as well. " Canada is deemed to be part of the USA for all licencing purposes for media dissemination, Internet, satellite etc."

OOPS! The Canadian nationalists are outside my house with a stake to impale me on already.

Originally posted by foresmac108:I don't know about the relative popularity, but lots of people I know use Pandora or Last.fm—hell, my mom uses Pandora. I've never had a friend or acquaintance ever mention using Napster or Rhapsody.

Well that's because Last.fm and Pandora are free.

Naspter and Rhapsody charge a monthly fee just like MOG. All three service actually VERY similar. I would love to see a future Ars comparison, especially with the new Napster beta coming out.

I'd actually be willing to try this out as soon as I have a way to use it on my Palm Pre. It'd be a nice alternative to finding new music as currently I have to search blogs, myspace, sample songs on amazon, etc. All these different things. I hope they have a good catalogue of international artists as I'm really into the european funk scene, japanese jazz scene, and into a lot of latin based music as well right now. Stuff is impossible to find or even import in most cases.

I thought this might be the "my first streaming service" because they actually have a fair selection and I can play what I want, instead of the Pandora/Last.fm model of "we play other stuff, but you might like it!".

However, they can't play a gapless mix. There's a few second gap as it loads the next track, which is very frustrating when listening to anything mixed by a DJ.

I guess if Hyman is using "his vinyl only" he only has the one turntable, b/c anybody with two would never be OK with the gap on MOG.

(To be clear, I mean the $5/month unlimited-streaming-plus-credits-to-purchase-non-DRM-MP3s subscription, not the "to go" service which is the unlimited-streaming-plus-unlimited-downloads-of-DRM-rented-tracks-for-your-plays-for-sure-device).

What is the bit rate of the purchased MP3s? What is the bitrate of the streaming audio?

Neither Google nor Napster's own site are helpful in finding this out ... all napster's FAQS are old and only give the bitrate of the "to go" service, and most Google results are also for the "to go" service.